The Guild Art Gallery presents From LA to Tehran: Mapping the Transnational State of Contemporary Iranian Art featuring works by artists Amir H Fallah, Roya Falahi, Asad Faulwell and Shadi Ghadirian. The show is accompanied by a text contextualizing the works of these artists within and outside of the conditions that currently surround Iran.

Maymanah Farhat provides an interesting and engaging look at the works of these artists, three of whom are based in LA while the other works in Tehran. Farhat explains:

Although the epicenter of contemporary Iranian culture lies in Tehran, its artists are active all over the globe. From its pioneering modernist painters to its cutting-edge conceptual artists, the peripheries of Iranian art are seemingly endless, having made significant waves in the international scene over the past decade. Propelling this borderless phenomenon is a dynamic group of artists and curators whose work remains in constant exchange with events “back home” in the republic. In Los Angeles, which contains one of the largest populations of Iranians in diaspora, this is most visible with the generation that immigrated to or was born in the US shortly after the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. With an estimated 72,000 Iranian-Americans living in the greater Los Angeles area, the city has become an important satellite of Iranian culture…. While artists in diaspora are confronted with the negotiation of various cultural trajectories, those in Iran face an equally complex environment, with a political atmosphere that is magnified to extremes in every aspect of life. There the push and pull between government-sanctioned culture and a population that is all too well-versed in the latest global trends in art, technology and fashion makes for a unique, if not contradiction-filled, brand of twenty-first century society.

The show opens Oct 6th 2009 at The Guild, New York with an opening reception between 6:30 – 8:30 pm. The exhibition will continue to Oct 31st.

For further information or questions please contact the gallery at info@theguildny.com or call us at 212.229.2110.